My aim this summer is to casually keep my blog going – it has helped me gather my thoughts throughout my degree, therefore thought it’d be a good idea to to so.
My first visit to Swansea was to visit the degree show, as a friend I met through Diffusion was exhibiting her final work. I really enjoyed the show, titled “I Dreamed My Genesis” after a Dylan Thomas poem, who is a world-famous war poet from Wales. The influence of culture, the world, and identity was strong.
Photography is an area of art I had not looked into much until this year, and seeing an entire degree show based on it was fabulous to see. It was also great to see and compare the Swansea Fine Art show, as I also had time to see that.
My favourite pieces were by Naomi Broom and Dylan Thomas (another Dylan Thomas). Naomi’s work explored the harm we were doing to our world, and collected most of her plastic to explore this with Cyanotypes. This was because of the deadly chemicals used through this process, correlating our mindless use of plastic.
Dylan’s work explores homophobia in England and Wales, and how it still exists years after the decriminalisation of the “offence”. His aim was to capture people from the LGBTQ+ community through photographic portraits and celebrate the individuality, especially aimed at South Wales.
David Nash: Sculpture through the Seasons has been described as his largest and most ambitious exhibition ever presented in Wales. The exhibition marks the fiftieth anniversary of the artist living and working in Capel Rhiw – a former Methodist chapel in Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales.
The exhibition features key sculptures from the late 1960s to the present day, exploring the different ways the artist has cut, carved and manipulated wood to produce sculptures that sit between the abstract and figurative. The amount of work exhibited was powerful, just through the sheer amount; this was a lifetime project.
Trees and the natural environment are central to Nash’s work, which extends to living sculptures including Ash Dome – a work that emerged from the planting of a circle of 22 ash trees in 1977. These time-based works are included in the exhibition through photographs, films and drawings. It was incredible to see the film of these trees growing, and the planning and precise time scale Nash used to create these amazing sculptures that show us the importance of wildlife, especially trees. They really captured the ruggedness and beauty of the north Wales landscape.
David Nash is one of Britain’s most important artists, his work has featured in exhibitions across the world and he is represented in many major museum collections. This international reputation was formed in the particulars of place and environment – the studio at Capel Rhiw and the seasons and elements of the surrounding Snowdonia landscape.
Freud’s personality theory (1923) saw the psyche structured into three parts (i.e., tripartite), the id, ego and superego, all developing at different stages in our lives. These are systems, not parts of the brain, or in any way physical.
According to Freud’s model of the psyche, the id is the primitive and instinctual part of the mind that contains sexual and aggressive drives and hidden memories, the super-ego operates as a moral conscience, and the ego is the realistic part that mediates between the desires of the id and the super-ego.
Although each part of the personality comprises unique features, they interact to form a whole, and each part makes a relative contribution to an individual’s behaviour.
The ego is ‘that part of the id which has been modified by the direct influence of the external world.’
The ego develops to mediate between the unrealistic id and the external real world. It is the decision-making component of personality. Ideally, the ego works by reason, whereas the id is chaotic and unreasonable.
The ego operates according to the reality principle, working out realistic ways of satisfying the id’s demands, often compromising or postponing satisfaction to avoid negative consequences of society. The ego considers social realities and norms, etiquette and rules in deciding how to behave.
Like the id, the ego seeks pleasure (i.e., tension reduction) and avoids pain, but unlike the id, the ego is concerned with devising a realistic strategy to obtain pleasure. The ego has no concept of right or wrong; something is good simply if it achieves its end of satisfying without causing harm to itself or the id.
Often the ego is weak relative to the headstrong id, and the best the ego can do is stay on, pointing the id in the right direction and claiming some credit at the end as if the action were its own.
If the ego fails in its attempt to use the reality principle, and anxiety is experienced, unconscious defense mechanisms are employed, to help ward off unpleasant feelings (i.e., anxiety) or make good things feel better for the individual.
The ego engages in secondary process thinking, which is rational, realistic, and orientated towards problem-solving. If a plan of action does not work, then it is thought through again until a solution is found. This is known as reality testing and enables the person to control their impulses and demonstrate self-control, via mastery of the ego.
An important feature of clinical and social work is to enhance ego functioning and help the client test reality through assisting the client to think through their options.
Sarah Lucas has long experimented with her androgynous look with food. They range from her first photographic self portrait, Eating a Banana, 1990 to the more recent Human Toilet Revisited, 1998. Photographic self portraits have been an important element of Lucas’s work since the early 1990s. The seminal Eating a Banana changed Lucas’s perception of her ‘masculine’ appearance from being a disadvantage to being something she could use in her art. ‘I suddenly could see the strength of the masculinity about it – the usefulness of it to the subject struck me at that point, and since then I’ve used that’ (Lucas quoted in Barber, p.16). The resulting confrontational self portrait photographs, made throughout the 1990s, complement her sculptural and installation work. Through them she presents an identity which challenges stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality. Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, she creates an image of defiant femininity. Her use of food parallels mine, as she put them on the areas of her body where they resemble.
Lucas appears in the macho pose she has claimed as her own. Clad in old jeans and heavy footwear, she sits with her legs wide apart and her feet planted firmly on the ground. Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the images. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. Food representing or standing in for sexual body parts is a common theme in Lucas’s work, mainly employed to reveal and subvert degrading objectification of the body in vernacular language. Fried eggs feature as breasts in sculptural installations and cover Lucas’s own breasts in her Self Portraitwith Fried Eggs. In Got a Salmon On #3 1997, Lucas stands outside a public toilet, a huge salmon resting from her shoulder to below her waist, a pun on the idea of a female erection. Summer 1998 portrays Lucas grimacing as she is sprayed with frothing beer. Like Eating a Banana and Lucas’s film, Sausage Film 1990, it satirises traditional female roles in pornography. These images present a female artist of masculine appearance as an object for male desire.
Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996
Au Naturel 1994 Mattress, water bucket, melons, oranges and cucumber 84 x 168 x 145 cm
Chicken Knickers 2000 C-print 273.2 x 196.3 cm
Eating a Banana, 1990
I really enjoy how Lucas has used the foods specifically to display sexual, and mostly feminine, body parts – I only wished I had seen these months ago. They capture what makes her feminine in the photographs, proving the foods sexual themes, as her appearance and manner capture the masculine aspect of the photograph. It begs the question of, why does masculinity get the mannerisms and aesthetic to represent it, while the femininity gets the objects to be consumed?
My final gap crit lead me to research Bedwyr Williams’s performance at Frieze, which was based around food. He dissected a life-size curator made out of cake during a performance piece, complete with internal organs and covered in marzipan skin. This lead me to think about what materials I could be using in my performances, instead of sticking to clay. I think marzipan was excellent to use, as the appearance of it can look very flesh-like, as you can clearly see in the image above, and also has a very light-skinned look, correlating with the myth of Pygmalion perfectly.
In her performance “Semiotics of The Kitchen”, Martha Rosler takes on the role of an apron-clad housewife and parodies the television cooking demonstrations popularised by Julia Child in the 1960s. Standing in a kitchen, surrounded by refrigerator, table, and stove, she moves through the alphabet from A to Z, assigning a letter to the various tools found in this domestic space. Wielding knives, a nutcracker, and a rolling pin, she warms to her task, her gestures sharply punctuating the rage and frustration of oppressive women’s roles. Rosler has said of this work, “I was concerned with something like the notion of ‘language speaking the subject,’ and with the transformation of the woman herself into a sign in a system of signs that represent a system of food production, a system of harnessed subjectivity.”
Martha Rosler in her performance
Rosler remarked about this work that “when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.” The symbolic terminology of the kitchen, she hypothesized, transforms the woman into a sign of the system of food production and harnessed subjectivity. The video subject is an “anti-Julia Child,” Rosler explains; she “replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.” It is not the production of food in and of itself that is Rosler’s target but the taken-for-granted role of happy housewife and selfless producer that the tape intends to spotlight. Her gestures demonstrate frustration with the language of domesticity, as she uses the domestic space of the kitchen as a backdrop for resistance and change.
Julia Child on her program
I’ve come to realise how similar my performances are to the tone of Martha Rosler’s piece, as she ironically uses a popular cooking show to show prejudices against women as domesticated goddesses. My tone is also very similar, as I use a mixture of irony and a bluntness to my commentaries, which have both the humour and sinister feel that Rosler’s performance has.
The Grotesque Female has become the main topic for many female artists, as it explores everything taboo and inherently sexist; exaggeration, hyperbole, and expressiveness are all key elements of the grotesque style. Certain aspects of the body are referenced when talking about the grotesque. These things include elements of the body that either protrude from the body or a part of the body that can be entered, which is a direct link to women’s bodies in particular. This is because the body in many cases is seen as pure where as the outside world is not. Therefore, parts of the body that allow the outside world in or allow elements inside the body out, are seen and used as an exaggeration of the grotesque.
Bakhtin explained how the grotesque body is a celebration of the cycle of life: the grotesque body is a comic figure of profound ambivalence: its positive meaning is linked to birth and renewal and its negative meaning is linked to death and decay.Frances Connelly, a well known art historian, describes the grotesque as “a boundary creature”, which is what I’ve hopefully achieved in my projections.
In the Medieval Grotesque Carnival, emphasis is put on the nether regions of the body as the centre and creation of meaning. The spirit rather than coming from above comes from the belly, buttocks, and genitals, which is what I’ve tried to re-create in my art by using representations of these exact body parts through food.
In her influential 1982 essay “Powers of Horror”, Julia Kristeva developed the term ‘abject’ to explore the human reaction to the fragmented, decayed or impure human body. The abject refers to the horror felt in response to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the boundaries between self and other, the loss of a sense of self.
ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. Similar to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, ORLAN uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. “I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context—not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty,” she explained.
I’m hugely interested in the monstrous aspect of her performance work, as well as her portrayal as famous figures of women, such as Venus in her Incidental Striptease series. This links to my monstrous women chapter in my dissertation, where I look into characters such as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl and Villanelle in Killing Eve, who are both monstrous women who are both empowering and valid feminist characters of women. My aim has been to translate this inspiration onto my work, and delved into how I can transform my body into the fetishised foods that often visually describe our body parts.
Back in August 2016, I saw Louise Bourgeois‘ work at the Tate Modern, who often deals with the grotesque. Highlighting her late work, the exhibition included an outstanding group of works including Couple I 1996, Cell XIV (Portrait) 2000, and Eyes 2001-5. This lead me to look at her for this year’s project, and use her drawings especially to influence my new works. This drawing and sculpture in particular intrigued me;
Topiary, 2005
Topiary, 2005-2009
The pieces appears to be a half pineapple, half woman, which actually sparked a few ideas relating to my work based on the fetishisation of food and women. The “forms” of much of Bourgeois’ work have this formless quality in two ways: in some cases, what we see appears to be something which doesn’t exist, such as the house-woman. In some cases, the biomorphic resemblances are made to male and female organs united in a single form (this has been described as “organ-logic”), or to a mixture of interior and exterior spaces united in a way that makes the interior seem to be outside and the exterior seem to be inside. Other qualities which are usually distinct and separate appear united or fused so that Bourgeois’ work has no location or position in terms of standard categories or in terms of art.
Le Regard (The Gaze), 1966 (latex over burlap)
These pieces sparked looking into textured/relief paintings again, particularly looking into making women into the forms of the food they are sexualised to look like – such as the emojis we use during sexting.
Cindy Sherman is an artist I have been greatly interested since the beginning of second year, however this year has been the first time I’ve taken the time to look at her work properly and understand her stance in the feminist community. This has then lead to her influence in my own films leading up to the degree show.
I personally really enjoy the Grotesque series, as it links to the food aspect of my work, but instead of sexualising it, Sherman makes it look like flesh. She’s also questioned femininity, and how women are constantly in a performance piece of how they desire to be identified as, which is usually a more conventionally desirable and attractive them. Her photograph below of her peering into the mirror is one of my favourites; she appears to be making herself seem as desirable as she could, almost seducing herself in the mirror until she is satisfied. I’ve used this effect many times in my pieces leading up to the show, using mirrors as an ongoing statement in my performances. This parallels to the idea that women’s sense of self is always contingent on something else, as she always looks away from the camera. She also chooses ultra-feminine roles who seem to always be reacting, therefore seen as slightly fragile. I think this is from how she’s taken ideas from films that often depict women in a misogynistic way, where there’s always a blonde victim type character who must be saved from the threat and are under the gaze. This thus plays on both sides of empowerment.
I wrote about Sherman in my dissertation, dissecting the Mother Embracing Children photograph collage, where she appears to depict a monstrous mother. I directly used Freudian theory to describe her possible meaning behind her piece, and I think her pieces here also challenge his theories; such as the Ego Ideal.
Untitled Film Still #2 1977
Untitled Film Still #25 1978
After Untitled Film Stills, Sherman’s work took an arguably darker turn and she started to utilise props and mannequins more heavily. The monstrous feminine began to take form in both her Sex Pictures series and Fairy Tales. Grotesque images of dismembered bodies, pubic hair and traumatised genitalia were just some of the themes that the artist touched on. Exemplified by her 1985 image “Untitled #140”, which features her lying on the ground with a pig snout covered in blood, Sherman articulates the uncanny and carnivalesque qualities that are conveyed through fairy tales.
I’ve been interested in joining all of these aspects in my films, especially how she’s built her characters of females and how they’re portrayed.
As said by Rachel Maclean herself, “Make Me Up is an exploration of both the achievements and complications of contemporary feminism. It sets out a discussion of how women’s bodies, voices and minds contend with a world that often prefers you to be slim, silent and subservient”.
I’ve had a huge fascination and passion for Rachel Maclean’s work, ever since I saw her film “Spite Your Face” in the Scotland and Venice show in 2017. Make Me Up takes place in a seductive and dangerous place where surveillance, violence and submission are a normalised part of daily life, where we see her using robotic single eyes scanning their expressions and watching what they’re doing, suggestive abuse with facial bruising and screaming, and the voice of Kenneth Clarke narrating almost everything through a woman’s body. The film explores how the media, on one hand, can be a great way to express and explore identity through the use of pages like YouTube. On the other hand, social media can be seen as a gilded prison that encourages women to conform to strict beauty ideals by perhaps those exact platforms. I’ve also chosen to use social media in my work because of these reasons, using sexualised emojis as one of my main topics.
The artist chose Kenneth Clark’s voice because of its evident associations with class and patriarchy. Rachel’s interests in found audio originate from ideas surrounding what senses form our identity, her use of different voices form a collage that changes the audience’s perception of the film’s tone. This is seen in Kenneth Clark’s pedantic and over-pronounced accent coming through the body of a woman stirring up themes of power and control. Make Me Up’s vivid compositions are informed by Rachel’s interest in “making a feminist film which looks at the female representation in art history”. The predominantly pink aesthetic is a comment on the “canonised view of art history which is very masculine”, subverting the male gaze into a doll-house aesthetic, looking like a naughties Barbie film. I loved how she joined so many examples of sexism, empowering connotations and Easter eggs in her film to convey our problematic patriarchal system.
I especially enjoyed the “temptation” scene, where the women compete against each other with the temptation of eating a sausage from a tree. This is also the scene that we see the woman with the bruised face, making it simultaneously carry the metaphors of domestic abuse, Eve tempting Adam, eating disorders, and aggressive control over women’s bodies. I think this scene alone greatly impacted my work, which is to do with the sexualisation of foods, especially considering the food Maclean chose was of a phallic shape.
A scene from Maclean’s film “Make Me Up” in a screening at Chapter
More than 90% of social networking users communicate through these symbols and more than 6 billion emojis are exchanged every day. On November 17, 2015 the Oxford Dictionaries announced the emoji , commonly known as ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, as its “Word” of the Year for 2015.
Students are doing PhDs in emoji studies. There is a serious debate about whether or not emoji is a universal language, or if it is in fact, destroying language. This image is the famous first line of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, translated into emoji. Emoji Dick is a crowd-sourced and Kickstarter-funded translation created by Fred Beneson. Approximately 10,000 sentences were translated at least three times before the “best” were chosen for the book.
Vyvyan Evans, an expert in communication and cognitive linguistics and author of The Emoji Code, explains that these icons help to reproduce in the digital environment almost all the characteristics of human communication in the real world. The symbols work in a manner similar to non-verbal cues in face-to-face interactions (body language, intonation, and facial expressions) and communicate the nuances of mood and emotion between people who cannot see the gestures of their interlocutor. “70% of the meaning of an oral conversation comes from non-verbal cues. Emojis add personality to the text and generate empathy among users, an essential thing for effective communication,” says Evans.
Graphic symbols are so globally recognized as a new communication code that there have already been cases of people being arrested for using icons considered threatening. In 2015, US teenager Osiris Aristy, then 17, was charged with terrorism for a Facebook post with gun emojis aimed at a police officer. The young man claimed that it was a protest against police violence towards the black community and the jury acquitted him.
In 2016, a 23-year-old French man was sentenced to three months in jail for sending his ex-girlfriend messages with gun icons. After cases like that, Apple replaced the revolver icon with a water gun. “Although not a language, emojis do have meanings under the same censorship rules as other codes,” Evans says. “They can and will be used in a court of law.”
When I was researching into Louise Bourgeois a few months ago, I found this drawing she made that sparked my entire series of short films where I morbidly transform myself into the fruits and vegetables women’s bodies are often compared as.
Topiary, 2005 Machamux. Drypoint on paper 15 1/2 × 8 in; 39.4 × 20.3 cm
The drawing appears to be a half pineapple, half woman. The “forms” of much of Bourgeois’ work have this formless quality in two ways: in some cases, what we see appears to be something which doesn’t exist, such as the house-woman. In some cases, the biomorphic resemblances are made to male and female organs united in a single form (this has been described as “organ-logic”), or to a mixture of interior and exterior spaces united in a way that makes the interior seem to be outside and the exterior seem to be inside.
Organ-logic is a term used by the art historian Rosalind Krauss), which refers to the representation of an organ which stands for the person who is significant in some way to another person; this other person is also represented by a body organ and the two organs are united to make something which signifies both people. I’ve been thinking about the significance of this term a lot recently, and how my work perhaps joins foods, and creates food-logic forms/bodies, and perhaps could be a way I can label my practice. My body and form, which represents all women’s bodies in my short films and performances, join morbidly and grossly with foods, such as marzipan and fruits, to create a “new” me that has tried (and grotesquely failed) to attain the emoji “beauty” standard.
Rumblestrip brings together works by six artists that carry a sense that something is not going right, that there are signs we should be heeding. They find the differences between subsequence and consequence, a link made between things happened or happening and things yet to come. They pull together precedent and prediction, the unreachable past and an uncertain future, pointing to the signs and signals that things are about to change, there are other paths than the ones we are currently treading.
A rumble-strip is the line of ridged road paint on the side of motorways, there to alert drivers to danger, to wake the sleep-deprived and to prevent accidents. It is a warning, a noise, a difference that signals a deviation, a change in direction.
All of the artists in the show and in the associated programme make works that exist in this unsettling moment of change. Emanuel Almborg has made a parallel between two different points in history and location – documenting a youth theatre project that deals with the Rebecca Riots in Wales and the London riots of 2011 to trace patterns in repression and revolt. Nooshin Farhid, working with Paul Eachus, has produced a film propped up on a structure of another film tracking a bullet sailing through a street, searching for its own point of impact somewhere between being fired and finding its target. This scene is neither the past or the present. It’s a layer of both, an unsettling present, a simulation. James Moore describes his paintings as being “like levels from a non-existent game” they seek to picture something tangible, conjured up from our culture’s obsession with these simulations and fiction.
The fear of being forgotten has given Paula Morison’s work an edginess. An archived catalogue of natural disasters and a countdown that is also counting up. Rather than a march toward the end this is a focus toward a mid-point where days still to come outnumber the days that have passed. Paul Eastwood uses video, writing and drawing as a way of conjuring things into existence. He views and frames art as a social production and cultural storytelling. He performs with and amongst the objects to act out their potential narrative meanings and functions. He is concerned with displaced fragments – of language, of artefacts and of culture – and how they take on new meanings. In her film Hill of Dreams 2016, Jessica Warboys draws from Welsh fantasy writer Arthur Machen’s book of the same name that relives his memories of rural Gwent, where Warboys was born a century later. An edited cut between ancient landscapes and contemporary objects that appear and vanish offers us a set of patterns to decipher, or a conjuring trick to contemplate.
Alongside Rumblestrip, a project by Tom Cardew is also showing, who has worked with g39 over the last year to develop a new installation. In a space that looks like a gallery store, a series of linked narratives are played by computer generated avatars. Dishevelled and not quite of now, they are ghosts. Their voices and stories stand out as distinctly human, as they go off on tangents, stumble over words and forget what they are discussing, drifting from sense to nonsense. The group gabble on, seemingly disconnected and separate, before starting to sync up as a choir.
Using digital techniques, comedic performance, song and an elaborately disorienting installation, Tom’s work at g39 explores modes of communication and the levels of understanding – and mis-understanding – that occur on social media platforms. The work is presented in a space that is usually not open to the public, leading you through store cupboards and out of date technology, projector screens and cardboard boxes. This passage leads you to what looks like the reverse of a wooden theatre stage set before opening out into a room full of screens.
The same CGI face peers out from each screen, but seems to be unaware of you, or of the other identical faces as the multitude of tired, ventriloquised masculine avatars mumble, shout and rant trying to get a word in edgeways.
Killing Eve is a cat and mouse series about Eve and Villanelle, written by Fleabag’s Phoebe Waller-Bridge. Villanelle uses the gendered way people perceive her to her own advantage. An elderly Tuscan target mistakes her for a sex worker he’s expecting. She gets into a bathroom to kill a French politician by telling a male member of staff that she has been instructed to bring ‘madame’ a tampon. Villanelle plays up her femininity to throw people off her scent, wearing a hot-pink chiffon meringue of a dress to a psychological assessment.
Eve and Villanelle each have a man close to them in a professional context: for Eve it is her co-worker Bill, for Villanelle her handler Konstantin. What first looks like a potentially sexist and casually abrasive relationship between Eve and Bill, in which he is uncomfortable working below a woman, softens and expands into one of believable support. Bill is, in fact, not a misogynist but a queer working father whom we see carrying his baby during a “childcare emergency”, seemingly a routine part of his life. Villanelle has the upper hand in her relationship with Konstantin, whom she manipulates by infantilising herself in order to control his sympathies. Both these relationships are explicitly non-sexual, which is important, because all of the sexual tension in Killing Eve is between women.
A number of Villanelle’s past and present women partners appear in the series, and the attraction between Eve and the woman she’s hunting is unquestionably the focus of the show, making the old 007 trope – glamorous bombshell falls in lust with dashing spy – seem deeply uninteresting. On Twitter, Emily Nussbaum argued that Villanelle might be uncomfortably close to the clichéd figure of the lesbian psycho/killer, à la Basic Instinct. Yes, there’s undeniably a link drawn between her sexuality and her drive to kill – she murdered a lover’s male ex by cutting off his penis. But, as elsewhere in Killing Eve, things are more nuanced than they first appear. Eve is not a helpless straight women being hunted by a lesbian predator; she is as willing a participant in the sexual frisson between them as Villanelle is.
Other moments that ignore the rules of a patriarchal series are;
As soon as Villanelle starts romancing her puppyish neighbour, we suspect it will end with murder. And not long after being introduced to sweet, mixtape-making Sebastian, it comes to pass. In a cunning reversal of “fridging”, a horribly sexist trope in which female characters are sacrificed in the service of plot, Sebastian sniffs Villanelle’s homemade perfume (laced with top notes of poison, naturally) and carks it. Murder doesn’t get more ironically feminine than that.
Killing Eve’s most distressing murder, and that’s saying something in a series in which castration is a signature, begins with a classic man-follows-woman scene. Except the man is Bill, who is lovely, brings his baby to meetings and must therefore die. And the woman is Villanelle. The setting is Berlin, with Bill tracking his prey through the streets at night, unaware that the mouse is stalking the cat. They end up in a nightclub where Villanelle flashes Bill a disturbing smile on the packed dancefloor, the place where many a woman has been groped. She chases him then stabs him to death, no doubt keeping perfect time with the techno.
Double standards dictate that when a woman covets nice things on screen she is shallow and materialistic (Sex and the City) and when a man does the exact same thing, he is a sartorial sex god (James Bond). Enter Villanelle, who lives in a Parisian apartment worthy of a Vogue shoot, has a fridge stuffed with champagne and sends the women she fancies and/or intends to kill French couture. In essence, she’s the kind of psychopath who gets the name of the designer who made her victim’s throw before stabbing him in the eye with her hairpin. Like a host of terrifying men before her, she is also controlling, instructing Eve to wear her hair down and complete an outfit with a particular belt. Nice (creepy) touch.
Bathroom brawls don’t tend to end well for women. It’s either a classic Psycho situation or Glenn Close drowned 50 times in the tub in Fatal Attraction. But, in an explosive episode entitled Dinner Date, in which agent and killer come face to face in Eve’s apartment, when the action moves to the bathroom it quickly descends from horror to … hilarity. Villanelle turns the tap on Eve’s head to stop her from screaming. Then comes the explanation for her visit: “I just want to have dinner with you.”
In Killing Eve, it is the grizzled male handler, Konstantin, who is unnerved by his uncontrollable female charge. “Letting yourself into my apartment and drinking from a tiny cup doesn’t make you intimidating, by the way,” Villanelle says with a winning smile when he pitches up at her place … to intimidate her. The role reversal reaches its apotheosis when Villanelle throws a really weird birthday party for him, although it’s not his birthday, and in a wickedly feminist sleight of hand comes dressed as … Konstantin.
commonly known as ‘Face with Tears of Joy’, as its “Word” of the Year for 2015.
saratrouble 